Man, I hate admitting that I am a brand follower, but Maxtor were once my favorite brand and their drives never failed me, in fact I still have a legacy system still running strong with a couple of Maxtor drives in it. Once Maxtor was bought out by Seagate and I saw that much of the Maxtor team was still around I have been an avid fan Seagate ever since. I have been impressed with their products and stand by the Barracuda line in particular. Since the Maxtor buy out I have only had one Seagate drive die on me. And I've seen plenty of WDs die in my workplace, so I do not see myself changing my mind any time soon.

I have two WD drives in my gaming rig. A 1tb Sata3 Caviar Black and an older 500gb Caviar Blue sata2. Both drives work as they should. The 500gb Caviar Blue is going on 3 years and its still quiet and quick. My HTPC has a four year old 320gb Caviar Blue that's also quiet and fast. Western Digital really does make good drives. I only buy OEM drives, no need to waste money of fancy packaging.

I have used alot of different brands of harddrives over the years,Seagate,Samsung,Maxtor,Hitachi,Toshiba,Western Digital. I have had problems with all of them except for western digital harddrives. I have never had one fail on me, and I use them in every client build, and in my own personal Rigs.

Wondering how does the Samsung Spinpoint F3 compare to the Seagate Barracuda and WD Black?

Really, the 7200.11? That thing is old. The 7200.14 is the current generation, is reliable, and much faster than any WD Black to date thanks to the 1TB platter design. Most of my drives are from Seagate, not a single issue. I have two 7200.12 drives in both my current gaming machine and my old one from back when the Athlon II x4 was brand new and just barely under $100. Again, not a single issue, and both are faster than expected. WD fan-boys really bug me sometimes. One product had firmware issues several years ago.

seagate

I have been a WD guy since I started building computers. Recently I decided to get a barracuda 1TB because it was cheap and I needed some extra space for my games, unfortunately the first one arrived DOA. I RMA'd it which took about a week and a half and the second one seems to be doing ok now, it's been in my system for about a month now. Needless to say I'm not impressed with Seagate and will be switching back to WD

Im WD all the way :-)

I prefer the WD Black edition.